Architectural Design V-IX: Ticino Permanente (E.Mosayebi)

Abstract

As part of the trilogy on Ticino, this semester we are asking about the permanent. Natural stone will be revisited as a sustainable, resistant building material in the search for long-lasting urban and architectural forms. We design spaces that can be appropriated by future generations. The house is to be regarded as a dwelling open to all uses.

Objective

- Knowledge about permanent building forms - Knowledge of rock types and quarrying techniques - Knowledge of the production of building stone and resulting waste products - Deepening in tectonics as an expression of constructive-structural joints - Design of new forms of housing - Models in different scales - Experimental visualisation

Content

Ticino Permanente This semester, we will deal with permanence and explore the question of when architecture is highly durable. We are looking for urban and architectural forms that resist the change of time and design spaces that can be reappropriated again and again by subsequent generations. The house is to be seen as a dwelling open to new uses. Natural stones are the ideal building material for this. Their colours, patterns and degrees of hardness reflect the earth's history where they were found. Thus, the origin of each natural stone remains identifiable forever. Moreover, ashlars are hard-wearing and durable. Until the 19th century, they were among the preferred building materials in Europe. It was only with the advent of modern materials such as steel and concrete that stone was relegated to cladding and displaced as a load-bearing building material. Especially in the discussion about sustainability, the potential of load-bearing natural stone has not been exhausted yet. The project is the third part of our trilogy on Ticino, in which we devote ourselves to different temporalities of architecture. After the first two semesters, which dealt with the temporary and the circular, we ask about the permanent in the third semester. Materially and constructively, we examine southern Switzerland's rich natural stone deposits. Gneisses are particularly common here and are among the oldest rocks on earth. We ask: Which stones and formats suit which durable buildings, and what is their expression? At the beginning of the semester, we make portraits of active quarries in southern Switzerland. We examine the types of stone, the quarrying techniques, the production of the ashlars and even the waste products. In parallel, we work on selected building sites in Lugano and develop architectures from the outside to the inside; from the urban setting, the tectonic expresses a coherent constructive-structural joining to the floor plans for durable and adaptable living spaces. In collaboration with BUK, large-scale models and constructive drawings are created. In workshops with the artist Phillip Schaerer, we develop stone compositions in the image. The semester is in collaboration with Guillaume Habert (Professor of Sustainable Construction) and Jacqueline Pauli (Professor of Structural Design).

Resources